I'm not talking about the what, but why would anyone think of using higher order functions to build user interfaces in the first place. It complicates the use case: building and mutating DOM Nodes.
>I think the opposite is true. The abstractions are more powerful when they afford building higher level abstractions on top of them.
And what may I ask requires so much power for building web front-ends?
Why are you using a higher order function to `[].filter()` an array? It complicates the use case: iterating over items.
>And what may I ask requires so much power for building web front-ends?
I don’t know what kind of apps you are building, but use cases for React at Facebook are very complex. You may create an Ads account and go through the ad campaign creation flow to see what I mean.
You use functions, right?
I don’t really see the issue here. “How do you parameterize Y by X?” “Create a function that takes X and returns Y.” Doesn’t really seem React-specific.
The unit of organization is indeed the component. Again, I’m not sure I understand why it being a first-class thing indicates a deficiency. By this logic, functions are deficient in JavaScript because you can pass a function to [].map(), or Promises are deficient because you can resolve() a Promise to another Promise.
I think the opposite is true. The abstractions are more powerful when they afford building higher level abstractions on top of them. Obviously you shouldn’t overuse this, just like you shouldn’t overuse higher order functions, but it’s a nice property to have.